Brandon's Huddle Buzz Shenandoah University Football

Photo courtesy Shenandoah University Athletics 

September 20, 2012

WINCHESTER, VA. - It is time for another edition of Brandon's Huddle Buzz, a weekly look at the football program from senior defensive back BrandonMartin.

This week, Brandon discusses the end of the non-conference slate and the upcoming ODAC slate.

Week three is in the books and we are an undesired 1-2. Christopher Newport, our opponent this past week, was a game we felt we could win this season. We had good practices throughout the week with our defense focusing mainly on the run game. CNU is a 'ground and pound' type of team that likes to run the ball and play solid defense to control the clock. This style of offense is much less complex than what we saw from either Stevenson or Ferrum.

I feel like this loss left us even more disappointed than last year's defeat because we wanted to make a statement as former USA South members but fell short to the two USA South opponents on our schedule.

Ed. Note: The Hornets staged a furious comeback against CNU last season and had a chance to win the game with less than a minute remaining in regulation, but missed an extra point before losing 27-20 in overtime.

Saturday, we felt that we would have a good game against them defensively because they are a run-first team and we have been playing pretty well against the run. Our front four: IanGriffin, EvanGriffin, PrestonFunk and NickErdman do a great job firing off the ball and preventing other teams from running inside on us. Jujuan Johnson and JoshRogers flow swiftly to the ball on a consistent basis to back up the front four.

We started off the game by giving up the first score. But after the first quarter, our defense was dominant. In the second half we recorded seven straight three-and-outs (offense goes three plays without a first down) and only gave up a first down on a controversial facemask penalty. We keep improving game after game on defense. We met our goal of giving up only 16 points by only allowing 13.

Ed. Note: The Captains final touchdown came on a 'pick-six' late in the third quarter.

Freshman AndrewSmith provided our spark on offense, scoring our only touchdown on a 47-yard run. Andrew has come to be a great spell back for CarlJoseph. He is a bigger, change of pace type of back that defenses have to prepare for. With Phil Gardner (our starting quarterback) getting hurt, it threw off the rhythm of our offense. As a team we still have great faith that our offense will pick it up this following week. Sophomore CoreyTaylor will step up to take Phil's place on the offensive two-deep.

We travel to Bridgewater this week. As a defense we are looking forward to this game because of how it ended last year. We let them drive down the field on us in the last 10 minutes of the game to put the game out of reach. It seems like our season is based out of revenge but we aren't playing for revenge. We plan on just going out there at 1:00 Saturday and proving to them that we are a year better and we are coming to play.

Let's work.